Quotes about the present

Pleasure is always in the past or in the future, never in the present.

Real generosity toward the future consists in giving all to the present.

What we call the present is given shape by an accumulation of the past.

I had been pushed further and further into a fate from which no escape or reprieve seemed possible. And so there came a moment when I stopped struggling, when I decided that I would cease making any more plans to return to the old days. I made up my mind to look upon the present as exactly what it was: it was all I had. (p232)

We are all inseparable from our times, whether we realize it or not.

What he knows is this: there is no past, there is no "what happened", there is only the moment that unfolds into the next, dragging everything with it, constantly renewing. Everything is happening at once.

No matter how happy I had been in the past I do not long for it. The present is always the moment for which I love.

Are we perhaps guilty of temporal chauvinism, believing that our own time is uniquely important, as all generation tend to think that their time is of unique importance?

See, you get caught up in the past and you become useless to the present.

"We are living at a time when history is holding its breath," said Arthur Clarke, author of Childhood's End and 2001 , "and the present is detaching itself from the past like an iceberg that has broken away from its moorings to sail across the boundless ocean."

I craved for the past, resented the present, and dreaded the future.

Even the most superficial of a newspaper reveals an important aspect of human psychology: our preoccupation with the short term.